from personal experience, you should use an unprocced WS outside of the CS window as a filler just when your CS debuff just wore off and you have enough rage for it. By the time CS comes off cooldown again, you would have pooled enough rage to dump everything again.

You can't predict that you'll have enough rage even if you usually do. Miss streaks and non crit BTs can happen, leaving you with less than nearly-full rage for the next CS.

Anyone got the math that shows its better to literally do no non procced WS prior to a CS in order to get 100 rage saved up even if it means having empty gcds, not arguing against it just curious as to the difference gained by doing that

Still no math but who needs formulation when you can observe real results. Go to the Target dummy, take off your proc trinkets, if you have dancing steel make sure you dont hit anything when it's up and don't do anything while enraged. Proceed to do only WS outside of CS and only HS inside CS. When I did it like this, with the same weapons in each slot (normal elegons) and a constant AP value, my recount logged WS avg hit 24,5k and HS avg hit 31k. Even with a relatively small sample size this is conclusive enough for me. If your main hand weapon is better than your offhand the results will be even more in favour of HS.

Let it be clear that I'm not saying never use unprocced WS outside of CS, just that if you do, and then end up with 60-70 rage as u go into CS, you've lost some DPS as that WS could have been used as a HS instantly after hitting CS. As always, there are exceptions with regards to trinket procs/pots/cooldowns.

After thinking about what everyone here said and drawing a few conclusions this is the rotation i came up with, please point out any glaring mistakes or suggestions
How to read:
Its a priority list, once an action from it has been executed or no viable action exists it will restart at 0.

IIRC you can fit four attacks in one CS window.
If that's true, you'd better use BT right before CS, so you can fit in three GCD's containing of either RB or BS proc, plus a BT. This because BT does the least damage of our main attacks.
So: BT > CS > RBx2/BS > BT > RB/WS
Enough rage gives you even the chance to fit in four HS's in that CS window.

I could be completely wrong about this though, and do correct me if I am, but I recall a change in the CS window from 6 to 6.5 seconds, so we can fit in four attacks.

You can't predict that you'll have enough rage even if you usually do. Miss streaks and non crit BTs can happen, leaving you with less than nearly-full rage for the next CS.

Still no math but who needs formulation when you can observe real results. Go to the Target dummy, take off your proc trinkets, if you have dancing steel make sure you dont hit anything when it's up and don't do anything while enraged. Proceed to do only WS outside of CS and only HS inside CS. When I did it like this, with the same weapons in each slot (normal elegons) and a constant AP value, my recount logged WS avg hit 24,5k and HS avg hit 31k. Even with a relatively small sample size this is conclusive enough for me. If your main hand weapon is better than your offhand the results will be even more in favour of HS.

Let it be clear that I'm not saying never use unprocced WS outside of CS, just that if you do, and then end up with 60-70 rage as u go into CS, you've lost some DPS as that WS could have been used as a HS instantly after hitting CS. As always, there are exceptions with regards to trinket procs/pots/cooldowns.

while its true you won't be able to successfully gauge your rage income all the time, I find that the following has helped a lot for me:

You should be sitting at approximately close to 0 rage right after a CS window dump, you should start conserving / building rage at this point, using Hthrow, Bshout. Assuming enough BT crits / melee hits (incoming damage in zerker stance) you should be capping rage with less than 10 secs left to your next CS dump. this is when you want to fill your GCDs with unproc'd WS assuming you have no other ability left ie: RB, proc'd WS, Bshout, Hthrow, etc.

TLDR: Use unproc'd WS when you feel that your next melee hit + BT hit will result in rage capping. Use HS when you're going to rage cap on your next GCD being a BT

Originally Posted by Kane49

After thinking about what everyone here said and drawing a few conclusions this is the rotation i came up with, please point out any glaring mistakes or suggestions
How to read:
Its a priority list, once an action from it has been executed or no viable action exists it will restart at 0.

CS window execute phase
you should pool enough rage before using CS so that you do 4 x executes within the CS window

Originally Posted by Maradar

IIRC you can fit four attacks in one CS window.
If that's true, you'd better use BT right before CS, so you can fit in three GCD's containing of either RB or BS proc, plus a BT. This because BT does the least damage of our main attacks.
So: BT > CS > RBx2/BS > BT > RB/WS
Enough rage gives you even the chance to fit in four HS's in that CS window.

I could be completely wrong about this though, and do correct me if I am, but I recall a change in the CS window from 6 to 6.5 seconds, so we can fit in four attacks.

You're right, if latency allows, and you're on your target 100% of the time in a CS window you will be able to fit 4 GCDs within the debuff time frame.

Priority is RB > WS (proc'd or unproc'd as rage allows) > BT : With BT taking priority if its about to come off cool down and because of this you almost always want to BT right before CS so you don't fit 2 BTs in a CS window. If you find BT to be coming off of cooldown in 3 secs of less and CS is off CD at this point, I personally would delay CS to wait for that BT to become available.

CS window execute phase
you should pool enough rage before using CS so that you do 4 x executes within the CS window

Execute is in the priority list for just that reason it just isn't casted unless your in execute range.
Heres how the rotation behaves in the execute phase due to returning to the top once an action has been found, so during the execute phase some actions are unreachable.

If you've levelled the class to 90 and don't know the rotation, something's badly wrong.

Levelled a warrior from 1-90 about 4/5 days ago and used a bit of intuition, resulting in about 50k-60k DPS on average in heroic blues or worse gear, having not yet done LFR. Not hard.

"It hath been found by experience that no matter how decent, intelligent or thoughtful the reasoning of a conservative may be, as an argument with a liberal is advanced, the probability of being accused of ‘bigotry’, ‘hatred’ or ‘intolerance’ approaches 1." - Cranmer's Law

I tend to not combine recklessness with deadly calm. The problem is that, particularly in the very beginning of the fight, you will have a lot of rage, and with recklessness up you will easily crit with your BT, causing an enrage, generating even more rage, as well as get several RBs, which are dirt cheap on your rage. With so much rage to spend, you really don't need deadly calm and it is better spent saved for your second CS rotation, when you don't have recklessness. It is a lot more rage effective that way.

Armory | What we do in life, it echoes in eternity.Blog | Hogi's Blogspot.

I'm doing 52k in heroics with half heroic half normal dungeon gear with 2 heroic 2 handers. Is that good? I have heroic one handers for SMF, but from what I read tg is better in dungeons for WW>RB rotation being best at trash pulls.

I'm doing 52k in heroics with half heroic half normal dungeon gear with 2 heroic 2 handers. Is that good? I have heroic one handers for SMF, but from what I read tg is better in dungeons for WW>RB rotation being best at trash pulls.

5-mans in general are a really bad place to judge dps, due to how short and simple the fights are.

Armory | What we do in life, it echoes in eternity.Blog | Hogi's Blogspot.

I tend to not combine recklessness with deadly calm. The problem is that, particularly in the very beginning of the fight, you will have a lot of rage, and with recklessness up you will easily crit with your BT, causing an enrage, generating even more rage, as well as get several RBs, which are dirt cheap on your rage. With so much rage to spend, you really don't need deadly calm and it is better spent saved for your second CS rotation, when you don't have recklessness. It is a lot more rage effective that way.

That's a good point but you also wanna be able to dump as much rage as possible during the CD stack, which will last a couple of seconds past the first CS window. Also if you delay Deadly calm by one CS it will be out of sync with Bloodbath/synapse springs/Bloodfury stack every 3 CS (6 for Bloodfury).

Execute is in the priority list for just that reason it just isn't casted unless your in execute range.
Heres how the rotation behaves in the execute phase due to returning to the top once an action has been found, so during the execute phase some actions are unreachable.

As you can see it still does bloodsurged wild strikes during execute range maintenance phase, is that wrong ?

Ok I get it.

To answer your bloodsurge WS: for me personally I try to fit every gcd available during execute phase while my CS is on cool down. Depending on if I'm building, maintaining, or trying to not cap rage:

I would skip all WS altogether. You want to spend as many gcds as possible on execute post sub-20% without limiting the use of CS and BT (ie: still keep these abilities on cool down). The only time you skip a BT use is in a CS window with exe, which I'm sure u know already.

Originally Posted by Alenarien

If you've levelled the class to 90 and don't know the rotation, something's badly wrong.

Levelled a warrior from 1-90 about 4/5 days ago and used a bit of intuition, resulting in about 50k-60k DPS on average in heroic blues or worse gear, having not yet done LFR. Not hard.

50-60k in H dungeons does not translate to 50-60k on raid bosses. Not sure what the point of your post is.